It doesn’t matter if the president actually suggested “multiple times” to senior government officials that the way to stop hurricanes from hitting the United States is to drop nuclear bombs into the middle of them. What matters is that when this story broke a few days ago, it was absurdly easy to believe that he did in fact suggest “multiple times” to senior government officials that the way to stop hurricanes from hitting the United States is to drop nuclear bombs into the middle of them. That is a thing he would do. Obviously.
This set off a familiar chain of events whereby everyone on Twitter and every possible political podcast gets to make jokes about the absurd thing followed by actual news outlets wasting time and resources tracking down experts who can speak to the feasibility of nuking hurricanes followed by the president calling the whole topic fake news and then everyone moving on to the next thing because he completely made up a phone call with Chinese officials or something. No hurricanes were nuked in the making of this dumb news cycle.
The very plausibility behind that dumb news cycle, though, is as good a marker as any for the sheer distance between this administration’s and every other administration’s treatment of science. This is not—even remotely—the first time that the federal government has floated some truly harebrained, Acme rocket launcher-ass schemes; it is the first time, though, that the president himself dreams up those schemes (or pieces them together from some collection of Fox & Friends segments like a zany offshoot of the Island of Dr. Moreau) and then puffs them out into the world like so much radioactive fallout.
Take, for example, an idea from the mid- to late-1960s known as Project ABLE. This was a scheme cooked up as the Vietnam War began to escalate, and the difficulties of fighting a fast-moving and locally knowledgeable enemy became clear. It was a bad scheme.
Project ABLE involved giant mirrors. Giant space mirrors. Giant space mirrors aimed at the jungles of Vietnam. Giant space mirrors aimed at the jungles of Vietnam in order to reflect sunlight toward said jungles and make fighting at night no different than fighting during the day. Giant. Space. Mirrors.
This is, obviously, an insane idea. But it actually made its way out of the darkest corners of the Pentagon or White House where people are willing to mutter insane ideas just in case one of them lands and they end up with some sort of fleeting imperialist glory or whatever and into an actual set of proposals, farmed out to a few large and thirsty companies like Westinghouse and Goodyear. These companies took their mission seriously and submitted a raft of technical documents demonstrating the feasibility of Project Giant Space Mirrors, at which point the concept leaked to the press and everyone was like “whoa hey this is a super dumb idea!” and it was then summarily shot down by the White House (White House science advisor to be exact; my random obsessions will get their moments in the sun) as if they hadn’t had anything to do with it to begin with. No giant space mirrors were built in the creation of this dumb news cycle.
But think about the fundamental differences between Project ABLE and Project Old Man Nukes Clouds. When Trump comes up with his latest inane idea, he births it from nothing and sends it out to dance amongst his minions, who then fall all over themselves to try and legitimize whatever the idea is until it is laundered thoroughly enough to appear on the president’s television in a form that tells him that his idea was actually great, of course it was, because it was his. From his mouth to Fox News and back again. In the past, the dumb idea was born in secret, sent out quietly to be means tested and prodded to see how both the laws of thermodynamics and the laws of public relations would react, and then quietly rescinded out of the public eye.
We have turned the government use of science into some sort of convex version of itself, an inside-out process whereby the least qualified person in literally the entire country wags the scientific dog until it pukes its guts out on the floor.
Which brings me to the White House Science Fair.
A quick recap: In April 2017, the Trump White House announced it would continue the tradition of a kids’ science fair that produced some of the most indelible images of the Obama presidency. Then they, uh, didn’t do that.
The Obama White House held the science fair six times, and it essentially acted as an official government endorsement of curiosity. The president appeared to genuinely enjoy learning things from 10-year-olds.
Leaving aside that Trump’s few interactions with children are nigh on unbearable to watch (admit it, you forgot that he has a 13-year-old son), his abdication of the science fair tradition makes perfect sense. He can never, ever, ever tolerate being anything but the smartest person in the room. Which, for obvious reasons, is something of a problem.
Trump couldn’t handle mingling with middle schoolers and asking how their projects work. He would interrupt them at every turn, and then shout across the room to Kellyanne that he was the one who invented baking soda volcanoes, in fact no one had heard that term before, but now after he said it we’re hearing it more and more.
The profound lack of curiosity, and accompanying deeply felt belief that no one could possibly be smarter than him, is not just manifested in canceling of whimsical celebrations of aspiring inventors. It plays out now in how the government actually functions, manifested most publicly in those Nuke The Storm-style kerfuffles but more insidiously across the agencies where things actually happen.
The day of Trump’s inauguration, I wrote for Gizmodo that his appointments to run the Department of Energy, of Housing and Urban Development, of Education and the Interior and the EPA, were profoundly dangerous—the bulldozers in charge of the henhouse. He picked the least qualified individuals imaginable, a sort of anti-expert designed in a lab to ruin the things they were charged with leading.
These things are of a kind. Letting Rick Perry run the DOE means that there is no Nobel-winning physicist in charge to talk down to you, only a bad-dancer oil enthusiast, just happy to still be in the mix after a couple of sad presidential runs, who will gladly follow whatever batshit instructions float across the National Mall from the White House. In that case, you can throw out ideas like nuking hurricanes or raking forest floors to your heart’s content, and who gives a shit when the so-called experts out in the world make fun of you, no one in this particular room—or the next room, or any room, you’ve made sure of that—could possibly know as much as you do. You’re bulletproof. You brilliant man. You goddamn genius.
random bits
A 58-square-mile raft of pumice stones is floating toward Australia at the moment, carrying coral organisms that could help replenish the Great Barrier Reef. I find this deeply poetic, as the source of the rock raft is an underwater volcanic explosion near the island of Tonga, one of the low-lying countries most vulnerable to rising seas. In other words, a drowning island just blew part of itself up in order to save another threatened piece of the planet.
Things that are bad this week: The G-7 for only providing $20 million to fight Amazon fires, and the DNC, for submarining the possibility of a climate debate because something-something-Joe-Biden-something-something.
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Notes from [gestures around]
Getting there. My wife and I are leaving the U.S. for some indeterminate period of time on September 1; in future editions, I’ll try and include something about where we’ve been staying, still hopefully science-ish. Not sure exactly what just yet, but we’ll be in Indonesia to start, so we’ll see how this idea goes.
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